Fabienne Verdier Rhythms and Reflections

FABIENNE VERDIER RHYTHMS AND REFLECTIONS A COMET Do all roads that lead to truth lie underground? Do all depths lie in darkness? dostoevsky And is the word Truth anything else but snow? One day, as I went round a gallery, luminous like an artist’s studio where work is left exposed to its own light, I happened on a painting by Fabienne Verdier. To me, her painted line seemed like the branch of a tree, broad as an artery, a tunnel in a badger’s sett, a cocoon in air, and at the same time like none of those things, but a thing of mystery whose exacting gaze takes your breath away! A reptile whose hiss lingers around the walls. Then it disappears, it loses itself elsewhere, leaving you with the feeling nonetheless that you were there the very moment its untamed presence so unexpectedly appeared. Of course, such an event never occurs twice. It was the painting that arrested the flight of this fugitive presence for an instant, like water holding on to air, yet expressing an instant of perception and the path taken to grasp it. As if, in fact, all the patience of the world had transformed into a lightning flash – the watchfulness of a lighthouse-keeper who knows to be neither fully awake nor asleep. Whenever solitude is put to the creative test, it becomes the key to a world. How to describe the solitude that is a crowd, unable to bloom into thousands of individuals. How to describe the crowd that blooms into a single world. I went to the Vexin studio one summer day when the sky was an extreme of tense blue. We know that such blue is, in reality, black. I arrived after a storm of creation, the point when everything has returned to orderliness, when nature has been redrafted and, after torrential rain, has been set back off in pursuit of another storm. A storm of matter – calm of light – strings cast down from the heights of the studio in a cascade of hieroglyphs harnessing the paintbrush; someone sheer and whole grasps the vast paintbrush and takes you by the hand. Thought inks out an ‘image’. Then, under pressure, it breaks up, scattering in droplets like shaking oneself off on emerging from an ocean’s 11 waves. So, leave image, leave thought, go back to the ephemera of sky, to our daily step in the tracks of the long march forward. The canvas is linen and cotton, it flows – fibre on which the immensity of a sign faces off in an explosive blast. From a vision offered up to a gaze – they act in tandem – depths are extracted, echoing resonances. Have you ever seen a painting that instead of opening a window into the wall, opens on to an inner state, a blaze opening up a field on the canvas’s surface? All is natural, and yet is revealed as an extreme of eccentricity, an unimaginable flower. A painter’s perception of a day’s simple experience makes it reverberate out of all recognition. The light I unexpectedly chanced upon in its original, non- determined state then opened wide into absolutes of light. Through the darkness of night, let’s look into the ocean’s nocturnal depths, let’s watch a great form weightlessly resurface and reincarnate in the reptile returning to extinction. Anne de Staël October 2016 12 THE RHYTHM OF THE UNIVERSE EMMA CRICHTON-MILLER To encounter a painting by Fabienne Verdier is to come face to face, unexpectedly, with a movement of the spirit. From a distance, Verdier’s paintings have an astonishing beauty. This is owed partly to the depth and subtlety of the densely pigmented, glazed backgrounds of her work. The colours of these backgrounds echo the land, sky and seascapes of Italian Renaissance artists or Flemish Primitives such as Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling. These provide a smooth, monochrome but never monotone support for the vivid, contrasting ribbons of paint and ink which dance, dart, roll, circle or sweep across the width of the canvas. Although these are clearly abstract works, they recall such vital life forms as waves or rivers, cloudscapes, mountains, the structure of buds and branches or cracks of lightning, not through literal representation but through the patterns of energy they express. As you come close, the bounding, rhythmic strokes of paint themselves become landscapes, three-dimensional terrains marked with uplands and lowlands, thickenings and vanishings, marked by fissures and erosions. On the one hand these works, with their grid-like arrangement of multiple canvases, have the compositional exactitude of the paintings and sculptures of Minimalism; on the other, they have the declamatory boldness of Abstract Expressionism. Their formal achievement and cultural sophistication is, moreover, married to a tremendous energy that seems to rise through your own feet and through your own body, in direct response to the momentaneous energy of the brushstrokes or paint streaks crossing the canvas. These paintings are not symbolic. They do not signify. They act and act on the viewer. And the action is one simultaneously of the soul and the body. Fabienne Verdier determined to be a painter at the age of sixteen. Critical to her formation was the ten-year period she spent in China, studying traditional landscape painting and calligraphy. Her master, Huang Yuan, impressed upon her that Chinese calligraphy is a form of abstraction founded in nature. Her discipline, as she has recounted in her 2003 memoir, Passagère du silence: Dix ans d’initiation en Chine, began in daily meditation within the landscape. Today, this link with nature remains fundamental: “If I paint a tree, I become the tree,” Verdier says, “I become the sea with its tides.” In keeping with Eastern tradition, she laid the paper on the ground, using the brush vertically, with ink and brush subject to gravity, as everything on the earth is subject to it. 17 In 1993, Verdier returned to France. She had plunged deeply into frames, so that she can stand on top of them and move the giant brush, Taoist philosophy and aesthetics, but felt a need to reach back to her its weight held from above, in a single gesture. The scene is dramatic. European roots. She says, “All my life I have been on a line above the void, Once the background has been painted, which occupies many days, between two worlds. It is very difficult, the to and fro. You are obliged to Verdier rehearses the movement of the brush that will achieve what she gather your forces, because every time you cross from one side to the other, is seeking. Then she prepares for the moment of painting, a vigorous but you question everything you thought you believed – and you find a self you graceful physical movement like a dance, undertaken with one breath to did not know.” In a hamlet in the Val-d’Oise, Verdier began to develop her ensure the integrity of the stroke’s unfurling. She explains, “All day I am unique practice, combining the transformation of Chinese brushes with in a chaos of material, building up to the moment of intensity. Suddenly Western acrylic pigments and varnishes, pushing forward always beyond you arrive, and see the traces of this vitality. It is an adventure, a very what she knew in a process of creative evolution that continues to this day. strong experience.” Verdier is her own sternest critic. Frequently the The structure of Verdier’s working world mirrors the processes of her canvas is wiped down entirely and the whole process repeated. At regular imagination. An old farmhouse opens onto a garden surrounded by trees. intervals Verdier burns rejected canvases in a ritual cleansing. But, in a Verdier’s original studio, opposite, has become a magnificent hemispherical contradiction of Asian tradition, the moment of creation is not the end study and library with tier upon tier of black shelving, filled with books of the process. The works are finished with layers of glaze to blend the and sketchbooks, notebooks and photographs. A large collection of brushes background with the line drawn. Sometimes, if the work uses white paint, of all different sizes and materials is displayed alongside found objects, rather than black, she reworks the three-dimensional landscape created by antiquities and other treasures – a true cabinet of curiosities. Much her gesture, reinforcing the clarity of its movement by wiping away excess preparatory work is undertaken here, sketching, reading, writing, alongside paint or infilling, tracing lines like rivers or coastlines, essentially sculpting an ascetic spiritual discipline of meditation and retreat from the world. the surface, but without losing the primal energy of the original stroke. She says, “Only by retreating into a life of discipline, contemplation and The last ten years have seen a series of radical developments in work can I clearly see what it is to be human and share my perceptions Verdier’s work. Through her enormous brush and funnel of paint, she through my research in painting.” is able “to make live the vitalism of the line” on a grand scale. A further Next door, a tranquil office surrounded by sliding glass doors offers breakthrough was inspired by a pair of bicycle handlebars. Attached to her quiet contemplation of the garden. For nature too remains, for Verdier, a largest brushes, these have enabled a new freedom and speed of movement, primary inspiration – whether the splendour of mountain landscapes, the liberating Verdier from the traditional western posture – artist standing coast of Brittany or the intimate revelations of a domestic garden. Beyond with brush in one hand, easel upright – to create her work with the full lies her studio.

Load more